Jenny Hval's Soft Dick Rock

Jenn Pelly meets up with the Norwegian art-pop disrupter at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan to talk about the frightening aspects of our own bodies, the importance of revolution in an era of passivity, and how her music is like the inverse of cock rock.

Thirty minutes after we first meet, Jenny Hval and I are jumping around in a bouncy castle with walls resembling six-foot-tall breasts. And the 34-year-old Norwegian artist is really going for it—bending her knees into a miniature catapult and then landing face down with arms stretched across an enormous inflated plastic boob. We’re at the ongoing erotic carnival installation inside Manhattan’s Museum of Sex, and, according to a little card in the gallery, this spectacle is designed to “increase physical awareness of the body.” Elsewhere, we take part in a match of Foreplay Derby, which is like a classic amusement park horse race, except with crawling penis shapes instead of horses. After Hval wins the game, she is given a small paddle by an employee of the museum, who instructs her to spank me (she obliges). At the museum’s exhibition on 1970s porn star Linda Lovelace, we take in a looping, floor-to-ceiling projection of the extremely graphic doctor scene of her hallmark film Deep Throat. With a great sense of ease, Hval tells me that once, for a project, she watched the scene about 50 times.

Porn, the body, and an inclination for the unknown are some of Hval’s affirmed interests, as proven by the gorgeous provocations of her 2013 breakthrough, Innocence Is Kinky, which begins with this spoken word cool-talk: “At night, I watch people fucking on my computer.” Kinky is startlingly explicit in its discussions of sexuality, with Hval’s streams-of-confrontational lyrics backed by surreal electronica and noise. Her huge, elastic voice is always stretching into new emotional shapes, and her intellectual avant-gardism has earned comparisons to the wide-open pop experiments of Laurie Anderson and Björk. But Hval never quite sounds like anyone exactly but herself, especially on her new record, Apocalypse, girl.

Amid swatches of dreamstate noise, the album includes some of her truest sky-scraping pop moments yet. Though recorded in Norway, Apocalypse, girl was informed by Hval’s unlikely revelations in America, where she’s spent considerable time since the success of Kinky. In the U.S., she connected most with people from the South, having herself grown up out-of-step as an atheist in Norway’s Bible Belt. (“The classic story was finding porn magazines in the forest,” she tells me at the sex museum.) It all makes for her most vulnerable, autobiographical, and truthful record to date.

In Norway, Hval found a producer in local noise expert Lasse Marhaug, who has worked with Japanese icon Merzbow as well as drone-metal greats Sunn O))). Hval says that 70 percent of their collaboration involved discussions of visual art and film, especially sci-fi and horror movies, as well as Todd Haynes’ Safe and Ingmar Bergman’s psychological drama masterpiece, Persona. Apocalypse also features Thor Harris, drummer for Hval’s one-time tourmates Swans, who contributed to the sublimely empowering single “That Battle Is Over” and eerie 10-minute experiment “Holy Land”. “I am trying to bring congas back into pop music and to my surprise she wanted congas on a track,” Harris writes in an email. “She is brave like that.” Swans leader Michael Gira adds, “I appreciate Jenny’s incisive and frank approach to lyrics”—which is saying something from a guy who named an album Public Castration Is a Good Idea.

Within the first two minutes of Apocalypse, girl, Hval swiftly swats away any female stereotypes that are still clinging to society. Capitalism and Christianity, beauty standards and baking, the need to bear children, self-doubt and liberation and struggle—her critique takes it all on. “Think big, girl,” she starts on sci-fi spoken word opener “Kingsize”, and by the album’s end, Hval could give Kanye a run for his money in terms of extreme, transgressive albums by iconoclasts who openly compare themselves to Jesus. “You have to think big for feminism,” she tells me. “You can be Jesus.”

It’s apparent that Hval sees the world in her own beautifully strange way no matter where she goes. When I call her to follow up a few weeks after our museum outing, she’s at home in Oslo, practicing with her effects pedals. “It’s a ghost in a box,” she says of the pedal. “I keep thinking, ‘Who’s that ghost singing along with me?’” But it’s her.

Pitchfork: Listening to your music, I can’t help but wonder what kind of relationship you’ve had with your own body throughout your life.

Jenny Hval: I am old enough to have grown up not thinking too much about it compared to what is happening to the kids now. I’ve been asked to do interviews about body image—like this “I’m happy in my normal body” quasi-feminist interview situation—and I really hate it. The body should not just be something you see. It’s also the inside of it. It’s frightening and abstract and much more than pretty or not pretty. The shape of it is boring. There’s a great relationship between pop music and the way the body could be seen from the inside—when I was singing or listening to music I would change shape in my head, becoming all kinds of things and people. Music is a way of making your body.

Pitchfork: The collection of photos inside the album all show weird close-ups of various body parts. They’re not conventionally pretty.

JH: A lot of them were between religious ecstasy and convulsion. On the shoot for those pictures, all the girls were watching a lot of [stadium-filling televangelist] Benny Hinn videos. This guy’s preaching to thousands and thousands of people and he keeps pushing out his hand and all these people fall over and convulse on the ground. There’s this kind of sexuality in Christian devotion, especially speaking in tongues and becoming unconscious. You can’t separate the spirit and the body. There is no divide.

Pitchfork: The album’s cover art also has this image of a girl passed out on an exercise ball, and the art for “That Battle Is Over” shows a girl passed out on a treadmill.

JH: [sarcasm] The gym is a center of capitalist breakdown, and everything is focused on the individual, yet the gym machines are the system. [end sarcasm] No. I just love those images. Is she exhausted by the elliptical? Is she humping it? Is she humping the system? Is she giving the yoga ball a hug? Is she having sex with it? Or is she just dead? To me, it’s unknown. There’s an element of pleasure in it that I very much like.

Pitchfork: What is “soft dick rock”? You use the phrase on Apocalypse, girl and you have also been selling T-shirts with it.

JH: I didn’t say it because I wanted to define anything. It’s just pleasurable to say. It’s some kind of poetry. I was commissioned to do a piece with a musician friend, Jessica Sligter, for the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Rights movement in Norway. It was like—“women! voices!”—so we thought, “We’ve got to have guys singing.” Anything that has to do with sexuality is always female, unless it’s about gaze, so we wanted to have a male-specific, gender-oriented singing project.It was pretty crazy.

The guys that we invited to the group were all musicians, but none of them were singers, and we had to make them sing. The project was to make these guys feel very uncomfortable. We started having a lot of conversations about all the vulnerable themes of male sexuality—feeling weak, losing one’s hair, the soft dick. It’s not even really a metaphor for anything. If you do an image search on Google for “soft dick”—don’t do it—you’ll just get diseases. Because soft things are terrifying. They’re the real signals of death. Images of strength can never be that terrifying. It’s the images of weakness that are a real apocalypse.

Pitchfork: Part of the reason the phrase “soft dick rock” was so interesting to me is because I’ve been doing a lot of reading on cock rock, as a genre. I feel like your music is the inverse of cock rock.

JH: For obvious reasons, I've never been able to identify with cock rock. I've always found it quite upsetting, but also funny. “Soft dick rock” was a genuine attempt to actually soften something that is usually seen as hard. Like, soften the apocalypse. I find that soft rock is also very macho. During Christmas, I had nothing to do and ended up watching that three-hour documentary on the Eagles, which was my least favorite band from growing up. They were soft-rock kings. I’ve always been thinking, “Is this what you define as soft?”

I was recently talking about Melancholia, the film, and how it’s really terrifying. It’s about the oncoming of the apocalypse, but it’s just there, coming close very slowly. There’s no war, there’s nobody fighting, and the only man in the film takes his own life. But the title Apocalypse, girl didn’t come until way after I wrote all the songs. I felt like I needed a title that was just big, something cock rock-y, but inverted. Being from Norway, I grew up with a lot of metal imagery—why do they get all the dark stuff?

Pitchfork: Take it back!

JH: Reclaim the apocalypse!

“If you do an image search on Google for 'soft dick'—don’t do it—you’ll just get diseases, because soft things are terrifying. They’re the real signals of death.”

Pitchfork: The record starts and ends with these lyrically explicit impressions of America on “Kingsize” and “Holy Land”. What were your feelings about America going into this album?

JH: What surprised me was that I really connected with people from the various Bible Belts. I’m from a nonreligious family, but I spent so much time in the Norwegian Bible Belt with people who are very religious, with “What Would Jesus Do” bracelets, big wooden crosses, speaking in tongues. So I was reconnecting with a part of my upbringing that I was very afraid of. In high school, I was a goth and tried to distance myself from the religion around me, but last year I realized that it probably had an impact. I probably envied those people for the devotion they could show. They had such incredible emotional outlets, even if they were all connected to their church and very formalized. They could go wild in that way. Very devoted religious people are so extroverted, but at the same time, they’re so repressed sexually and so conservative. I’ve never been able to understand that combination, but I’m fascinated by it.

Pitchfork: This album seems more confessional or autobiographical. There is one song, “Angels and Anaemia”, where you’re singing directly about self-doubt and questioning what you’re doing as an artist.

JH: Originally I wanted the album to start with that song; I loved the idea of an album starting with the words “self-doubt.” Is self-doubt a way of being that’s actually positive? Self-doubt can be about feeling belittled, or just like you’re not even existing. It can be about refusing to accept the self as we know it—refusing to be owned by people who look at you, or to be pigeonholed. I guess in that song, the self-consciousness is replaced by the unconscious.

An early working title of the project was Ruining My Reputation. I kind of wanted to perform a suicide, an apocalypse of the artist that I’ve seen myself as. An exorcism. [laughs] And one of the ways of “ruining my reputation” was to be very personal. Then again, everything you do is so personal. In the end, it doesn’t matter so much if you write about your own life or not. It’s going to be as much artifice when it comes out as a piece of music. Everything is in character in a way. But that’s a great thing. In the end, I was trying to make this pop album that didn’t work. The apocalypse is a failure.

Photo by Jenny Berger Myhre

Pitchfork: I read that you were inspired by Fiona Apple on this album.

JH: I always find Fiona Apple inspiring. First of all, it’s her aggression. I don’t mean that I find her angry—that would overlook her outstanding lyrical power and switched-on performances. She really takes great care when she writes about these all-consuming emotional moments. And she isn’t shy about it. She isn’t afraid to come across as bitter or frightening. Actually, she doesn’t seem afraid of coming across as anything. Her work is so intense, so detailed, so fierce, and yet there’s nothing labored about it. Secondly, she has this amazing ability to reflect upon something as it is happening, right there and then. She goes through things in her music with clarity, and respects—and scrutinizes, until it hurts—her emotional reactions.

Pitchfork: I was reading the credits for the record, and the cover design was credited to Lisbet Volger, which is the name of the main character in the film Persona.

JH: And Sister Alma [the other main character of Persona] is credited with doing the samples for the album. I’ve seen Persona at least 10 times, and only recently have I began to really enjoy the narrative and the psychology of it beyond being quite surrealist. When I was working on the album, I reached that point where I was really interested in the conversations in the movie and the way they are as intimate as the pictures. Before, I saw it as a sublime monologue, some kind of detachment. I find it very different now.

Pitchfork: A lot of that film centers on the blurring of identity between the two main characters. Was that narrative about identity something you were interested in?

JH: I started writing music because I got this recording device that had a delay effect. There is this interplay with the abstract, the sound of yourself not being quite yourself, this slightly distorted image of yourself in the mirror. That was an obsession for a long time, to see myself from the outside. That is very much how I see Persona as well. Working with art, in general, is exploring identity and being angry at it—can you ever say anything true? Does whatever you’re doing even matter to you? It’s this constant interplay.

Pitchfork: “Take Care of Yourself” and “That Battle Is Over” feel like two parts of a piece—you discuss age and conventional ideas about happiness and success.

JH: I wrote them as opposites using part of the same vocabulary. “Take Care of Yourself” goes for a delicate intimacy that you can’t really get when everything becomes about sexual success, and this frightening idea that sexuality is not something that leads to something and then climaxes and it’s over; it’s this endless thing that you can never satisfy. You can see it very cynically—just floating on the sea not doing anything, just wallowing. It’s like the Internet: click click click. I also wanted to make the genitals something very ordinary, very mundane objects, and also something about safety more than the sex act.

Pitchfork: You sing a line on “That Battle Is Over” about the likelihood that you might get breast cancer, which is startling to hear.

JH: I was watching this documentary about previous waves of feminism. One of the famous American feminists was saying that as soon as women were granted a soul in the media in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there were all these news stories about how feminists are depressed. Every now and again, you see these stories. I saw a story some years ago that was warning: “Please have kids because you’ll get breast cancer if you don’t have kids early in your 20s.” These stories are so depressing. There is always somebody saying, “Conform, the battle is over, feminism is over, go back to the kitchen and have some babies, you’ll be healthy.” Health is so important now, it’s ridiculous—the body has become frightening, this thing that will kill you if you don’t keep really healthy. The body is the enemy now.

Pitchfork: On “That Battle Is Over”, you also sing about being “on the edge of history.” What does it mean to you to be on the edge of history with your music?

JH: In that line, it’s negative, and something I don’t believe in. I grew up in a peaceful time; we always wanted world peace for Christmas. It was very Norwegian—a safe upbringing in a safe world. My generation thought: “The Second World War was horrible and Norway was in it. There are conflicts in the world, but when they’re over, there will be no more conflicts.” And that’s a terrible illusion. It’s creating an extremely passive generation of young people. If you believe that you have nothing to fight for, that just means the people in power, and the people with money, can sneak anything into your life. Everything can be taken away from you.

I disagree very strongly with people saying “that battle is over.” If you’ve started a battle, I don’t think it ever ends. The illusion that it’s ended can reverse any good results that have come from it. I’m constantly reading and trying to enlighten myself to how the world works in its silent ways to make everything seem normal when it’s actually incredibly discriminating. Everybody needs to read a lot of revolutionary stuff, because the revolution is a big part of our will to live.

“If you believe that you have nothing to fight for, that just means the people in power can sneak anything into your life.”

Pitchfork: What else have you learned about yourself as a musician the past few years?

JH: I’ve always seen myself as the person listening to alternative music and all that—generic indie person. I always tried to be the least pretty I could be. When I was growing up, I would try to sing out of key very consciously. I was probably afraid of trying too hard to do something beautiful, and then I just wasn’t good enough. But I’ve learned that I was also on the outside—wanting more challenge by living in that more conventional world.

I’ve learned something about trying to express desires. Now I play with two Americans onstage, and we wear really long wigs and makeup. It makes me have to live through a different way of being female. It feels very different to have long, thick, brightly colored hair. It makes me feel so conflicted to wear, and I believe showing a conflicted person onstage is actually really interesting and emotionally engaging. I’m trying to not just be the person standing on the outside and looking at something, but to actually be it, in a way. That’s actually bringing me closer to the intimacy of the album. I’ve also learned from playing with a lot more girls onstage with me. I don’t think I realized how much in a man’s world I had grown up in musically.

Pitchfork: In the U.S. right now, a kind of feminism has infiltrated pop culture. Is the same thing happening in Norway?

JH: Norway is kind of incomparable because it’s so small. We don’t have a Beyoncé—we don’t have anyone who is huge to put feminism behind her on stage. Norway is pretty forward thinking in terms of gender equality, but we don’t seem to practice it as well as we think. I’m constantly thinking: How much power have we really gained? We have to keep fighting to even keep what we’ve fought for already.